SystemD and Debian Trixie questions

[advice1010]

MX 23.5 XFCE

After reading a little about some of the changes MX has to make due to upcoming Debian Trixie release, some questions have come up.
These questions are a little dangerous because they are about trust and security.
I do not think that anyone can really know the answer without working for / being associated with the development of these applications.
So please just bare with me because I kind of know that there might not be an answer, but just some mentioning some hear say / observations.
I say this because for example SystemD is known to be a controversial topic so please try not to say anything that will cause this post to be locked.

First off, thank you to all the MX developers for your efforts in providing both a non-SystemD and a SystemD based distro.

I have not been using Linux as long as many users, but to me it does seem quite strange that one company, that has been bought out by another company, is slowly taking over piece by piece.
Nice that work has been done which benefits the community, but just wonder what happens once every piece has been taken over.

SYSTEMD
(Keep in mind that most of this is just hear say and vague, but just curious if any of it can be considered to be still be a concern)
Obviously SystemD has for the most part taken over most distros so this will not be a conversation like it was years ago, but something that always stood out was hearing people mention in the past that it could be more of a "backdoor".
Now that SystemD has been around for a while, is there anything actually within SystemD that could still be viewed like this? or was this just tension years ago about something taking over?

I once heard someone mention something about it producing "binaries" as opposed to text files which was a concern.

It was also said that because there are so many applications in the suite that it would not be as easy to review?

Again I do not think this really could be answered, I know that nothing is necessarily "safe" but just was wondering if there were still mentionings this, I have heard more about the issue of eliminating choice, then this.


DEBIAN 13 TRIXIE (XFCE)
Not good because while I already had the above on my mind, knowing that MX would be using Debian Trixie at some point, I decided to just quickly try actual Debian Trixie live just to see if any issues occurred on my machine. Worked fine but I noticed something that made me start to question some things.
In the past I had mentioned an application called "Redshift" which ended up being a topic of concern because everyone discovered that it uses something called "GeoClue" and were not happy with this.
When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

To me this is really strange, guess it could be because of maybe the installer would try to setup timezone? but still does not seem like this should be.
Not that this is necessarily malicious, but I never really ever questioned Debian itself and it being "trustworthy"/"safe", most would hope that it is not because obviously it is connected to many distros.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew why "GeoClue" is running by default?
Is it because of what I mentioned about the installer?
Do all installers use something like this?
To me this should not even be installed at all, but if so then it seems like it should be more of a choice rather then a default.
If anyone has any information to share about this please do so.

Again all of these topics just so happened to all come up at the same time so figured I would mention these questions.

Thank you to anyone who reads this

[AK-47]

I do not think that anyone can really know the answer without working for / being associated with the development of these applications.

Sounds like you're about to ask questions that are best directed to the respective developer(s) or owner(s) of such software, rather than the MX forum.

SYSTEMD
(Keep in mind that most of this is just hear say and vague, but just curious if any of it can be considered to be still be a concern)
Obviously SystemD has for the most part taken over most distros so this will not be a conversation like it was years ago, but something that always stood out was hearing people mention in the past that it could be more of a "backdoor".
Now that SystemD has been around for a while, is there anything actually within SystemD that could still be viewed like this? or was this just tension years ago about something taking over?

Hearsay versus evidence, take your pick and run with it. I know which one I prefer. And as I often mention to those who are hell-bent on being able to choose between 20 different ways of starting your OS, have you seen the state of the Linux kernel? If there's any place for a backdoor, it would be that, and SysV init won't save you.
Not to dismiss perfectly valid concerns about systemd though, but the question you ought to be asking is, what problem do you aim to solve? In your case, probably some threat modeling would be useful.

I once heard someone mention something about it producing "binaries" as opposed to text files which was a concern.

It produces binary format logs, which have attracted some concern because of the format used for those files. The use of binary format for logs are not itself a concern and can actually be a massive advantage when dealing with large log files. Tthere are some claims about the log file not being append-based and requiring some data in the middle to be kept up to date which is not great for a log file. That said, freedesktop appears to refute that: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Softwa ... nal-files/

It was also said that because there are so many applications in the suite that it would not be as easy to review?

While it is concerning that there are a lot of components that are part of the suite that ultimately replace other components, they are not hard dependencies of systemd init system. For example, you can even use systemd-boot without actually running systemd at all. The systemd project suffers from a naming disorder.

Again I do not think this really could be answered, I know that nothing is necessarily "safe" but just was wondering if there were still mentionings this, I have heard more about the issue of eliminating choice, then this.

The problem with too much choice, is that you end up with analysis paralysis, and you end up with fragmentation. Nobody wants to develop apps for a severely fragmented ecosystem, and even amongst the professional-grade apps they rarely target anything other than Ubuntu or Debian as they have stable libraries. No surprise then you get more apps in these repositories.
For now, I would be thankful that at least you have the choice to not use a certain OS that demonstrably worse.

DEBIAN 13 TRIXIE
Not good because while I already had the above on my mind, knowing that MX would be using Debian Trixie at some point, I decided to just quickly try actual Debian Trixie live just to see if any issues occurred on my machine. Worked fine but I noticed something that made me start to question some things.
In the past I had mentioned an application called "Redshift" which ended up being a topic of concern because everyone discovered that it uses something called "GeoClue" and were not happy with this.
When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

To me this is really strange, guess it could be because of maybe the installer would try to setup timezone? but still does not seem like this should be.
Not that this is necessarily malicious, but I never really ever questioned Debian itself and it being "trustworthy"/"safe", most would hope that it is not because obviously it is connected to many distros.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew why "GeoClue" is running by default?
Is it because of what I mentioned about the installer?
Do all installers use something like this?

I recall geoclue is used for the DE to provide certain services, for example night shift colouring. The installer would be querying a web service for it to parse and determine your time zone based on that. Our installer currently doesn't have the ability to auto-detect a time zone.

To me this should not even be installed at all, but if so then it seems like it should be more of a choice rather then a default.
If anyone has any information to share about this please do so.

You can always try uninstalling it and seeing what happens. You have the choice, after all.

[Mauser]

MX 23.5 XFCE

After reading a little about some of the changes MX has to make due to upcoming Debian Trixie release, some questions have come up.
These questions are a little dangerous because they are about trust and security.
I do not think that anyone can really know the answer without working for / being associated with the development of these applications.
So please just bare with me because I kind of know that there might not be an answer, but just some mentioning some hear say / observations.
I say this because for example SystemD is known to be a controversial topic so please try not to say anything that will cause this post to be locked.

First off, thank you to all the MX developers for your efforts in providing both a non-SystemD and a SystemD based distro.

I have not been using Linux as long as many users, but to me it does seem quite strange that one company, that has been bought out by another company, is slowly taking over piece by piece.
Nice that work has been done which benefits the community, but just wonder what happens once every piece has been taken over.

SYSTEMD
(Keep in mind that most of this is just hear say and vague, but just curious if any of it can be considered to be still be a concern)
Obviously SystemD has for the most part taken over most distros so this will not be a conversation like it was years ago, but something that always stood out was hearing people mention in the past that it could be more of a "backdoor".
Now that SystemD has been around for a while, is there anything actually within SystemD that could still be viewed like this? or was this just tension years ago about something taking over?

I once heard someone mention something about it producing "binaries" as opposed to text files which was a concern.

It was also said that because there are so many applications in the suite that it would not be as easy to review?

Again I do not think this really could be answered, I know that nothing is necessarily "safe" but just was wondering if there were still mentionings this, I have heard more about the issue of eliminating choice, then this.


DEBIAN 13 TRIXIE
Not good because while I already had the above on my mind, knowing that MX would be using Debian Trixie at some point, I decided to just quickly try actual Debian Trixie live just to see if any issues occurred on my machine. Worked fine but I noticed something that made me start to question some things.
In the past I had mentioned an application called "Redshift" which ended up being a topic of concern because everyone discovered that it uses something called "GeoClue" and were not happy with this.
When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

To me this is really strange, guess it could be because of maybe the installer would try to setup timezone? but still does not seem like this should be.
Not that this is necessarily malicious, but I never really ever questioned Debian itself and it being "trustworthy"/"safe", most would hope that it is not because obviously it is connected to many distros.
Anyways, I was wondering if anyone knew why "GeoClue" is running by default?
Is it because of what I mentioned about the installer?
Do all installers use something like this?
To me this should not even be installed at all, but if so then it seems like it should be more of a choice rather then a default.
If anyone has any information to share about this please do so.

Again all of these topics just so happened to all come up at the same time so figured I would mention these questions.

Thank you to anyone who reads this

Last thing I have seen on this forum the MX LINUX developers are developing different ISO's without systemD and with systemD for MX 25 unless you plan on using KDE Plasma which will give you no choice since KDE insists on using Wayland which requires systemD. Let us see how this plays out but from what I see MX LINUX developers are trying to give us all options.

[siamhie]

When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

I don't have geoclue running on my stock Deb13 XFCE installation.
Did you install redshift along with the recommended package geoclue?

[DukeComposed]

When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

I don't have geoclue running on my stock Deb13 XFCE installation.

I'm curious to know why OP is asking for Debian 13 support on an MX Linux forum.

[siamhie]

When in Trixie, I randomly opened up "Session & Startup" and noticed that in the "Application Autostart" tab that by default, "GeoClue" is set by Debian to be running at startup?

I don't have geoclue running on my stock Deb13 XFCE installation.

I'm curious to know why OP is asking for Debian 13 support on an MX Linux forum.

I don't think it's for support as it's more of random thoughts regarding the upcoming MX release and what Deb 13 has put out. I could be wrong.

[DukeComposed]

I don't think it's for support as it's more of random thoughts regarding the upcoming MX release and what Deb 13 has put out. I could be wrong.

This started with a 674-word post that only mentions MX three times, none of them relevant. It entirely boils down to "systemd, what's up with that?" and then some Trixie complaints, as you've answered, about some of its configurations.

[anticapitalista]

... will give you no choice since KDE insists on using Wayland which requires systemD.

Just to point out that Wayland does not require systemd.

[beardedragon]

Will XFCE with AHS have the option of systemD or be sysVinit in MX 25?

[siamhie]

Will XFCE with AHS have the option of systemD or be sysVinit in MX 25?

Check out the blog if you haven't already.

Changes coming with MX 25